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The Top Internet Dangers for Kids

August 31, 2012 – Woburn,
MA- As the Internet plays an increasingly prominent role in
children’s lives, parents are getting increasingly worried about the ease with
which undesirable content can be accessed online. This is borne out by the
growing number of people activating the Parental Control component in Kaspersky
Lab’s products. On the eve of the new school year in many countries, Kaspersky
Lab analyzed the statistics generated by its Parental Control component
worldwide for the last six months.

The Parental Control
component’s main task is to help parents safeguard their children from the
hidden dangers of uncontrolled use of computers and the Internet. By default
the component is not enabled – it has to be activated by the parents
themselves. Parents can choose which of the 14 website categories they want to
make unavailable to their children.

Data received from
Kaspersky Security Network (KSN) show that alerts from the Parental Control
component are triggered most frequently by the ‘Pornography, erotic materials’,
‘Social networks’ and ‘Illegal software’ categories. Globally, those three lead
the other categories by a wide margin. There are 60 million attempts to access
sites with pornographic content every month, which is almost four times more
than the second place category. The alerts generated by Kaspersky Lab’s
Parental Control component demonstrate that children are either deliberately or
unwittingly visiting sites with undesirable content.

The statistics for Parental
Control component alerts are not the same for every country. The ‘Anonymous
proxy servers’ category was ranked third in both the US and the UK, accounting
for approximately 9% of all alerts in those countries; the global average for
that category was just 2.43%. Also in the UK, fourth place was occupied by
‘Illegal software’ (6.3%). Obviously, British children and teenagers take a
keen interest in software and are familiar with the methods for bypassing web
filters and the use of anonymizers.

Another distinct feature of
the US and the UK was the relatively high percentage of alerts triggered by the
‘Gambling’ category – 5.77% and 5.68% respectively. The percentage of the
‘Violence’ category was also high in the US – it occupies fourth place in the
country’s rating with 7.32% of alerts. This is more than in the other countries
analyzed.

Although the ‘Pornography,
erotic materials’ category was the runaway leader in the US and the UK, the
Parental Control alerts for the other categories was more evenly distributed
than in the other countries analyzed. This indicates that, on average, parents
in the US and the UK activate more categories of the Parental Control component
than parents in other countries.

Germany was the absolute
leader in the ‘Pornography, erotic materials’ category: 80% of all alerts in
the country were triggered by this category, which significantly exceeded the
world average of 53.6%. In absolute numbers, that translates to 5.3 million
alerts per month. This could be due to the fact that many parents in Germany
only activate this category in the Parental Control component, leaving websites
in all other categories freely accessible to their children.

In Brazil, the absolute
leader was the ‘Social networks’ category with 57.84% - twice as much as the
‘Pornography, erotic materials’ category. This share of Parental Control alerts
differed significantly from that of the world average.

“Although many children are
taught aspects of internet safety in school, the IT industry, too, can play its
part and help safeguard the young online, raising awareness of online dangers
among both children and their parents. This can help parents take a more
proactive stance in keeping their children safe online. Clear, prominent and
accessible advice contained within the IT industry’s services – particularly at
the point of provision – can help ensure that children and young people can
safely get the most from those services. And it is important to have a
coordinated approach across the industry to ensure the information parents need
gets distributed effectively,” said Peter Davies, Chief Executive of the Child
Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre which works across the UK.

“The dangers of the
Internet are increasing by the day, though this hasn’t stopped children from
becoming even more active on social networking sites in the last year. Social
networks are an extremely dangerous environment for children. They are the
favored hunting grounds of cybercriminals who use them to spread malicious
links and links to fraudulent web pages. They are also a place where your child
can come into contact with unpleasant or even dangerous people. At the same time,
the more traditional online dangers shouldn’t be forgotten, such as viewing
content that is not intended for children as well as phishing scams and various
other types of fraud,” said Konstantin Ignatev, Manager of the Web Content
Analysts Group at Kaspersky Lab.

About Kaspersky Lab

Kaspersky Lab is the world’s largest privately held
vendor of endpoint protection solutions. The company is ranked among the
world’s top four vendors of security solutions for endpoint users*. Throughout
its 15-year history Kaspersky Lab has remained an innovator in IT security and
provides effective digital security solutions for consumers, SMBs and
Enterprises. The company currently operates in almost 200 countries and territories
across the globe, providing protection for over 300 million users worldwide.
Learn more at www.kaspersky.com.

*The company
was rated fourth in the IDC rating Worldwide Endpoint Security Revenue by
Vendor, 2010. The rating was published in the IDC report Worldwide IT Security
Products 2011-2015 Forecast and 2010 Vendor Shares – December 2011. The report
ranked software vendors according to earnings from sales of endpoint security
solutions in 2010.